Monday, March 03, 2014

Alan Morrison: Another Indiana Amway/Walmart Player

After Indiana
House District 42’s Republican Alan Morrison appeared at a crackerbarrel
session in the small town of Clinton over the weekend, someone noted on
facebook that “Morrison was very condescending and argumentative to some of the
citizens, especially to a couple of local school teachers.”This is
no surprise to people closely following the school privatization movement in
Indiana, but the good citizens of Clinton (and those in Vermillion, Vigo, Clay,
Warren, Fountain, and Parke
counties which make up Morrison’s district) probably don’t know that Morrison, like his comrade and fellow Republican
Bobby Heaton, have been bought by billionaires who want to turn Indiana schools
over to for-profit companies (some of which have funded Indiana Republican
campaigns) and give money to religious schools.

Morrison, like local basketball hero Heaton, has abackgroundin sports, not
playing them but as a corporate executive of the Flint Generals hockey team. He
now works directing recreational
services for Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

And like Heaton,
Morrison has been bought by 13 extremely rich people out to privatize Indiana public
schools.In 2010, Morrison received
$72,000 from the Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC (see page 2
in PDF),
by far the biggest contributor to his campaign.The Hoosiers for Economic
Growth PAC is funded by the Walmart/Amway Corporation DeVos family/hedge
fundmanager/school voucher/charter
school millionaires and billionaires who run the American Federation for
Children and All Children Matters, front groups which I detail in my upcoming
book Hoosier
School Heist.

Hereis
how the Walmart and DeVos/Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC's school
privatization agenda went down. Using heavy funding from 13 donors which
included Betsy DeVos, Walmart’s Alice and Jim Walton, Pennsylvania hedge fund
managers, two leaders of charter schools in Indiana (John Bryan and J.C.
Huizenga), and Jeb Bush friend John Kirtley, the American Federation for
Children’s Indiana-registered PAC in 2010 funneled over $4.6 million into the
Hoosier state (through the Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC) and six other states
using the Terre Haute office mailbox address of Christian Right lawyer James
Bopp Jr., the man behind the Citizens United case which gave rights to
corporations to fund campaign super-PACs without publically disclosing their
donors and who also handed Morrison some money (see page
4).

In 2010, the American Federation for Children gave
various Indiana corporate school front groups $375,000 to attempt to swingeighty-five primary and general elections, using
millionaire Fred Klipsch, School Choice Indiana, and Hoosiers for Economic
Growth to electa super-majority of Republicans to the Senate and
take total control of the House to pass anti-public education laws in 2011.

In April 2012, Klipsch even wrote aletterendorsing Morrison again (or someone on the DeVos/Walmart family payroll wrote it).

On his website, Morrison says “I value family, education,
individual freedom and limited government as major components for success.”But the family he values most is the
Amway/Walmart family.Limited
government, for Morrison and all Indiana Republicans, translates into handing
taxpayer money over to the school privatizers. Morrison however, believes it is not the
for-profit charter schools run by Jeb Bush’s friends who are destroying
schools in Indiana; it is the illegal immigrants who are “a drain on education.”

There’ s not a whole lot of illegal immigrants in Clinton,
Indiana, draining funding from the schools, but Walmart moved in a few decades
ago and helped close down all the local businesses. And people like Morrison
won’t rest until Walmart-funded charter schools close down a few community
schools in his district, too.

A national expert on the corporate and theocratic assault against public education, Doug Martin is the author of Hoosier School Heist, the book which exposes the corruption, scandals, and campaign financing behind so-called school reform in Indiana and elsewhere. OrderHoosier School Heist and get the facts.